Ishani Thakur
August 15th, 2016
Jun Ru/Ishani Organization
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Today we went to Project Read and showed Joahan (an eighth grader in the Redwood City public school system) Jun Ru’s game of repeated addition. Essentially, the game had kids tie rope together to simulate addition. The lengths of each rope segment represented a number and the kids had to add the numbers together to get to the answer. Joahan’s reaction to the game was awesome, to say the least. He not only called it “cool”, but he thought it would help his little brother who is in the third grade. When interacting with the game, we could tell that not only was Joahan engaged, but he was also inadvertently acquiring a physical sense for what addition was. By being able to arrange the ropes in any order, Joahan got a sense for the what the commutative property was, and by putting the ropes together he understood the essence of addition, pudding things together. It made me realize the impact that I could have on students. Through a simple game, I could see Joahan understanding more and more math. It was very rewarding.
Furthermore, during our visit we played a board game (in addition to the computer game) called Allowance. In the game, Joahan had to subtract $1.75 from $5.00 and he struggled a lot with this simple subtraction. Initially, I believed he was making silly mistakes, but the problem was much deeper. Joahan didn’t understand what subtraction meant. He could mechanically go through the motions, but he didn’t understand that he was taking something away from something else. We had to explain that he had to think of subtraction in the context of a number line and making hops on a number line. By trying to convey a physical sense for subtraction, I realized that my assumptions about general education in the US are too high. Not everyone has access to the same level of education as I do and that leaves holes in kids’ math knowledge. I went into the PACT project believing that I didn’t have to start from the base level of mathematics, but unfortunately we had to teach them the basics through our games. It was very humbling to see how different my and Joahan’s education has been.
I was surprised at how saddened I was at seeing Joahan struggle with basic concepts. I wanted to sit down with him for hours and hours and teach him everything I know to help him reach an eighth grade level of math. I also noticed that he felt uncomfortable when doing math. It stems from not knowing as much as others, and I sincerely hope he is able to fix these gaps. Doing my PACT project has helped me realize that I need to somehow help tutor or fix the education system in the future.
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